The handbrake GUI has a drop down list of encoding presets. I find that as an amateur, selecting one of those presets is the best way to make a file smaller.
Handbrake is supposed to make things simpler than ffmpeg, except that it does not.
> I find that as an amateur, selecting one of those presets is the best way to make a file smaller.
These presets are not helpful when you want to try to make something specific like "I want to make this file fit in 3GB" which is something that an amateur typically wants to achieve.
It's not even that hard to actually do, which makes me wonder why Handbrake has never implemented this kind of things.
Given how CD/DVD/BluRay went out of mainstream, I think the more typical use case is "I want the file smaller, while retaiming FullHD, HD, SD quality" for archival / streaming, for which the profiles are fine.
> "I want the file smaller, while retaiming [sic] FullHD, HD, SD quality"
The problem is that "retaining X quality" is extremely vague and subjective. Also, a lot of people conflate resolution with quality (see YIFY Torrents). While yes, you need enough pixels to have reasonable quality, if the encoder set CRF to 50, 8K video won't save you.
Handbrake gives you no indication whatsoever what quality you are getting at the end of the day. Even though it's technically possible to do many things in that regard (make previous of different compression rates and let the user decide, or draw comparison of video clips before and after compression highlighting where the image details are lost, etc...).
There's very little that is user-friendly in Handbrake.
you're conflating user-friendliness with user power and capability.
An app can be very user friendly, but does not give the user the power they didnt know they wanted. This is what handbrake is - you get a nice GUI, you get to choose from a list of presets (unless you know what you're doing and customize it). Then you click go - you can even queue up more files.
Someone who is using handbrake is not going to learn the command line. How would they know how to queue up ffmpeg? Don't say batch scripts, because that's not something a normal user would use.
It might surprise you to learn computers are not magic...
I’ve used the CLI tool for a lot of my media library and it really isn’t that hard, there are even wrapper scripts in GitHub that simplify the whole thing and are easier than handbrake
I agree with ekianjo, it would be great if Handbrake had a 'fit to 700MB' option.
After trial and error, I found the original file size to be preserved and not to correspond to the presumed smaller output of say a lower resolution output.
You can do this with a two-pass encode and a calculator. Take your desired filesize and divide by the runtime of the video. Put that bitrate into the UI. (It does seem they could add this to the program.)
It would also work with a one-pass encode, but setting the bitrate that way risks wasting space in simple parts of the video and degrading quality in complex parts. Two-pass encoding takes longer but distributes bandwidth better.
I haven’t used in a while, but handbrake did have really useful presets for a variety of devices: it was useful because there are a lot of video compression knobs to turn (you can still do so after selecting the preset)
